RumpelThickSkin wrote:1) Primary purpose questions - got one wrong on one. Possibly because I identified the point of the passage incorrectly.
well, ok, that makes sense -- in fact, "identify the point of the passage incorrectly" is pretty much the only way that you can miss a primary purpose question.
in order to diagnose the problems here better, i'd like some more information on how you attack the primary purpose questions in general.
specifically, the best way to attack primary purpose questions is to
predict your own answer before you look at the answer choices. if you've judged the content of the passage correctly, you'll probably come pretty close to the correct answer in your prediction. then, the primary challenge is not to be led astray by tempting answer choices that are completely wrong, but sound good.
2) According to and EXPECT questions - those which required students to read between the lines and need at-least two proof statements. Really requires detailed reading of the passages. Again I don't know how to tackle these question when I have just skimmed through the passages.
if you see an "according to" question, you should NOT have to "read between the lines" -- on these questions, you should actually be able to find the answers literally IN the text of the passage (although it might be rephrased a bit). in fact, that's the meaning of the phrase "according to": the passage literally has to SAY what you are looking for. note the difference between these questions and inference questions, on which the passage doesn't say what you are looking for directly, but says something from which the answer can be deduced.
i'm not sure exactly what you mean by "expect questions" -- could you provide an example, please?
3) Inference - again got stuck between two and picked the wrong one. ( Ended up picking Mix up and One Word Wrong Choices).
whenever students say "i usually pick the wrong one of two answers", this is almost always an illusion -- if you are guessing between two choices, your success rate is almost certainly going to be very close to 50%.
the reason why you might think you are missing most of these guesses is because, when you guess correctly from two choices, that guess will just blend in with the rest of your correct answers -- so that you are only going to notice the WRONG guesses.
also, this information isn't really going to help us give you advice; after all, if you ever miss any questions, you will
always miss them by "getting stuck between N choices and picking one of the wrong ones", except on those rare occasions when you feel absolutely certain about an answer that is actually wrong.
what we need here is information about the PROCESS that you are using. how are you answering inference questions?
remember that inference questions
must be PROVED from WHAT IS IN THE PASSAGE, beyond a reasonable doubt.
note that this is sharply in contrast with what the word "inference" means to most people in normal life -- to most people, "inference" refers to extrapolating, or making some sort of guess/prediction from the observed data. that's exactly the sort of thing that will get you in big trouble on inference questions on the test.
